(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for performing an encoding using a block code having an input/output (I/O) of a variable length.
(b) Description of the Related Art
An error correcting code of a communication system is additional information having a correlation with message information. A transmitter may couple the message information to the additional information having the correlation with the message information and then transmit the coupled information, and a receiver may restore original message information through the coupled additional information from the entire message in which error exists.
A block code is a kind of error correcting codes, and in the case in which the block code is used, an encoding and a decoding may be performed in a block unit. In the block code, a length of an input message which becomes a target of the encoding and a length of a final message which is output after the encoding are fixed to predefined values to thereby configure one block. For example, a (n, k) block code has the length of the input message of k and the length of the output message of n. In this case, n is greater than k, a portion corresponding to a length of n−k is the additional information with the correlation with the input message information, and error correcting capability may be assigned to the output message through the additional information. As the length of the additional information is longer, it is possible to sense and correct more errors.